What Sources Do You Use…?

I got an amusing question on a survey the other day. It was an employment/jobhunting survey, and the question was framed as “what of the following sources do you use to gather information on a prospective employer?”

It had an array of employment websites, a few newspapers, and a bunch of employment and industry magazines.

I laughed a little.

Asking this type of question isn’t showing much awareness of the current methods of information gathering used by my generation at all, and makes it quite hard to give a useful answer. I checked around with various friends as well, and all those that did research roughly followed my methods. The most important factor is: none of us checked a specific publication. Not one. Nobody had a specific site or magazine in which to look up our potential employers. Instead, we’d hit up a search engine. We’d look up a few generalized profiles of the company as a whole, usually scope their HR/recruiting website, and then go trawling for employee/former employee blogs and testimonials, trying to dig up the ups and downs of that particular company. We’d discard particularly glowing reviews as astroturf, and particularly bilous ones as butthurt former employees, and take the rough average of what remained.

As a generation, our media loyalties are almost null. We look for a specific type of information, and the source is nearly irrelevant, except in determining bias.